Teaching is certainly one of the most important professions in our society, yet its status and attractiveness have been systematically diminishing in the last decades. At the Université catholique de Louvain, Prof. Xavier Dumay is using his ERC Starting Grant to investigate the cultural and institutional transformations that have led to this "teaching profession crisis".

With a diameter of around 143,000 kilometres and a mass 300 times that of the Earth, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Scientists have debated for decades how such giants formed. Now, astrophysicists of Universities of Bern and Zürich and of ETH Zürich, amongst which are ERC grantees Yann Alibert and Maria Schönbächler, proposed a solution to this puzzle. The research results, published recently in the magazine Nature Astronomy, provide crucial hints to long-standing questions about the formation of other planets in the solar system and beyond.

At the forefront of medicine, gene therapy is based on the insertion of genes into an individual's cells and tissues to treat a disease. Scientists are currently testing several approaches to this experimental technique. One of them, Prof. Seppo Ylä-Herttuala, intends to develop a novel method to treat myocardial ischemia by activating endogenous genes to propel angiogenesis. If successful, he will open a new era in gene therapy.

More than 100 million people worldwide suffer from valvular heart disease, affecting one or more of the heart’s four valves and causing breathlessness, chest pain, dizziness and fainting. If severe valvular heart disease is not properly treated, chances of surviving decrease, especially in the elderly. The only effective therapy is heart valve replacement, which may entail some risks and lead to revision surgeries. What can be done to improve safety and durability of artificial heart valves?

Water is a peculiar liquid. In fact, it's thanks to some of its peculiarities that our "blue" planet looks the way it does, and that life has evolved most of the characteristics we recognise today. ERC grantee Prof. Anders Nilsson has made his career out of studying water, in particular trying to understand the secret double life water leads at extremely cold temperatures.

For more than 3000 years, men have captured wild Asian elephants to use them for work or entertainment. In a new study published today in Nature Communications, ERC grantee Virpi Lummaa shows the harmful effects of these ongoing practices on wild-caught animals. The findings are based on detailed records from the past 100 years over a population of 5000 timber elephants from Myanmar.

Group theory, functional analysis and ergodic theory – three distinct areas of mathematics that meet within the theory of von Neumann algebras. The RIGIDITY project, funded by the ERC, aims to classify families of von Neumann algebras.

Understanding complex structures means separating irrelevant information to get to something simpler and easier to understand. When you look at something from a distance – although you don’t see all the details, you can still describe what you see. ERC grantee Balázs Szegedy has developed several mathematical tools for providing a compressed yet useful view of complex structures.

How does one infer the dynamics of a DNA minicircle in solution? How does one align the neuronal firing patterns of several neurons across individuals? These questions are intrinsically statistical, but nevertheless escape the traditional tools of statistics. The ComplexData project investigated such questions from a mathematical and an applied context.

Once limited to modelling physical problems in engineering, today Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are used by a diverse array of fields, from natural resources to meteorology, aeronautics, oil and gas and biomedicine – to name only a few. But key mathematical issues remain unsolved, particularly when addressing their control, a must in technological transfer. The ERC-funded DYCON project aims to find answers.